about

Sarah Scarsbrook is an artist and practice-based researcher. She graduated from Kingston University in 2004 with a BA in Fine Art, and is a practising artist, as well as arts manager and MPhil/PhD candidate at Birkbeck. In 2011, she completed her MA in Arts Policy and Management at Birkbeck, with the thesis, The Importance of the Artist Community in Contemporary Urban Planning, before embarking on her MPhil/PhD in 2013. Sarah’s current thesis The Professionalisation of Visual Arts Practice in the UK since the mid 1980s, investigates a changing artist identity and the factors impacting on these changes including the art school, the creative industries, frameworks of artistic labour, and perceptions and expression of the self. Her practice-based research is looking into modes of investigation through the medium of the film-essay. Sarah regularly exhibits her artwork and presents on related topics in London and across Europe. In May 2015, along with two MPhil/PhD colleagues, Sarah coordinated the symposium Visual Artists Today: A Symposium on the Artist Identity and in Autumn 2015 a publication of the Birkbeck postgraduate journal Dandelion will be published as a continuation of the same theme.